Tiz-ah-Kor: The Watchers

Greetings. After a longer than intended hiatus after HF20, I’m finally back with the fourth installment on Tiz-ah-Kor. This installment looks at the entities called the Watchers. As always, there is some ambiguity here- if you want to use them as an element in a tabletop game, feel free to make some tweaks or changes to better suit the world or setting you’re plugging them into.

The Watchers are the primary force behind Tiz-ah-Kor, and without them Tiz-ah-Kor would rapidly become a mundane city. Their will is what moves Tiz-ah-Kor between planes, and their power protects it from the most significant of threats. The Watchers are timelessly ancient, though with the city’s tendency to slip through time when it visits a different plane, timeless might be less of an apt descriptor than ignorant of time. The Watchers don’t focus on one place for long, instead aiming to fix a problem and move on to the next. Very often, their work to repair rifts between planes or the influence of chaotic forces is basically invisible to mortal observers, and they tend to prefer to work on countering the forces of entropy instead of shutting down stable portals (such as the ones found in the Planescape setting, where portals link multiple planes of existence because that’s how the cosmology works).

When incorporating the Watchers into a setting, it’s important to note what their motivations are. While it would be easy to write off their motivations as beyond mortal comprehension, and perhaps their more obscure goals are lost to time (at least to a mortal’s perception), there are a few things that could be more concisely listed as goals. The first is protecting inhabited worlds against entropy. While, arguably, the Watchers are more oriented around reversing entropy itself than protecting mortals, they do prefer protecting life as opposed to eradicating it, despite the consumption of resources that could be considered entropic. The second is defeating forces of chaos, whether it be deities that threaten natural order, cultists tearing rifts between worlds, or even powerful monsters or magicians who act with disregard for the rules of reality. However, the Watchers are only opposed to destructive or supernatural chaos- anarchists have nothing to fear, nor do pragmatists, political agitators, or rebels, unless they tamper with the fabric of reality. These two goals are primary, though certainly they could be involved in other agendas that more directly benefit mortals- defeating evil overlords, fulfilling prophecies, or other generally beneficial interventions could be justified, provided that the consequence is dramatic enough that the fate of a world or its populations are at stake.

How do the Watchers fulfill these motivations? Having powerful supernatural entities do all the work can make a story boring, and while certainly there is some behind the scenes metaphysical power at work in repairing the fabric of reality, many of the more obvious actions are completed by mortal agents. The Watchers prefer to keep Tiz-ah-Kor secret, meaning that it tends to manifest in geographically remote locations and uses mortal operatives when possible. That said, Tiz-ah-Kor doesn’t maintain an official currency or establish broad reaching diplomatic agreements, so the Watchers sometimes implement creative solutions. In addition to sending out agents, both to proactively protect the city from threats (powerful magicians, neighboring kingdoms, monsters, etc.) and to achieve its goals, the Watchers may act directly. A peasant farmer might have a dream about the location of a powerful artifact, retrieve it with suspicious ease, and rapidly- even unnaturally- develop abilities to fight to save the village or even the world. A high priest may see visions of the end of the world and be motivated to mobilize the faithful to prevent catastrophe. The Watchers may even interact with the divine entities of the world, though even to those they may seem alien and unnatural with their formless shapes and obscure agendas.

The Watchers, from a practical perspective, can impact your story or campaign directly through interventions- perhaps a cultist’s summoning ritual mysteriously fails, or a powerful stranger arrives in the nick of time to intervene in a one-sided battle. Maybe a mundane item becomes empowered and then loses its newfound powers shortly thereafter (or, alternatively, maintains its power, but cannot be identified by magicians). Player characters may find themselves pushing beyond their limits, doing more damage and being harder to kill, or finding an untapped reservoir of magical energy. Remember that in these implementations the goal is not to take the limelight away from the players, but rather to introduce something that requires further investigation, exploration, or development. A character finding sudden strength in combat may, when resting, have visions of obsidian pillars in a distant city, or a magical item empowered by the Watchers may whisper to its owner in an alien language that only the party (or that particular member) understands.

I hope that this entry provides you with another resource to use in your stories and campaigns. As always, if there is anything about Tiz-ah-Kor you’d like me to cover in more detail, let me know in the comments.